


yesterday went too soon

by armillarysphere



Category: Olympics RPF, Swimming RPF
Genre: Angst, Anxiety Disorder, Depression, Future Fic, Hopeful Ending, M/M, Pining, Rio 2016
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-12-02
Updated: 2012-12-02
Packaged: 2017-11-20 03:05:57
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 7,034
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/580604
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/armillarysphere/pseuds/armillarysphere
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>There's a momentary pang of longing so strong that it makes you feel like the room has flipped upside down and back around you, leaving you disoriented; nauseated. Then it's gone and the longing is just loneliness and self-imposed exile and you know you brought it all on yourself, even if part of you tried to blame him for so long. He was the one still training, going on his merry way without you; still having fun.</p>
            </blockquote>





	yesterday went too soon

**Author's Note:**

> Thank you to theellibu for handholding me through writing this! Thank you also to cathedralhearts for the awesome mix!
> 
> Please be aware of the themes mentioned in the tags. Michael is in a not good headspace so selfcare is advised if that is going to be a problem for you to read.
> 
> Title from a song by Feeder.

When you think back on it, it surprises you how easy the first few months were. You’d thought, before, when the competition still raged on, when winning was the only driving force you had, that they would be the hardest ones, that this feeling of... of stagnation, of disaffection would be an immediate reaction, not something that would grow and fester. You should have known better.

Those first few months, though, those first few days even, when you flew away from London before the curtain had fully closed, had been nothing short of blissful, when there had been nothing but golf and fishing and endless beaches. You had a party in Vegas and Allison came and Nathan came and it didn’t matter that your path didn’t cross with Ryan, because there was time for that, all the time in the world, you thought, to fix the splintering cracks that you’d (both) been denying were there. You, of all people, had time beyond time.

You never did, though. You let the cracks widen until there were nothing but shards hanging in the air between you. Your fingers flip your cell phone over in your hand, thumbing the lock screen open and closed restlessly, Herman’s face disappearing and reappearing like a blinking streetlight. You want to call but you don’t know what to say. You tap out the same text message you’ve sent him three times, once every year since London, and send it before you second (third, fourth) guess yourself.

**still havin fun?**

You throw the phone into the cushions beside you and close your eyes, tipping your head back to look through your eyelids at the ceiling. You don’t want to wait for the buzz of a message anymore, you are ninety-five percent sure there won’t be one, but the five percent of you that hopes there will be won’t quiet down. The question seems so fucking loaded these days, you think to yourself, as bitter and resentful as you feel yourself getting. It’s fucking Rio’s fault, you think again, hand forming a fist at your side, knuckles pressing into your thigh. Six months to go and you can’t turn the TV on anymore because all you see is him.

The phone vibrates and you jump and Herman barks when his head is jostled in your lap. You calm him with a hand scratching between his ears as you reach for the phone with your other, heart beating wildly.

**jeah. sorry to dispoint u**

You make a noise that's half sigh half growl, frustration boiling over long enough for you to get halfway through replying "that's not what I meant" but you stop yourself. Actually, you probably did. 

There's a momentary pang of longing so strong that it makes you feel like the room has flipped upside down and back around you, leaving you disoriented; nauseated. Then it's gone and the longing is just loneliness and self-imposed exile and you know you brought it all on yourself, even if part of you has tried to blame him for so long. He’s the one still training, going on his merry way without you; still having fun.

It's not like - it's not like you ever made any kind of pact; no 'you quit, I quit', pinkie-swear promise; no whispered confession across a pillow that he won’t be able to go on. Sure, he told you and Bob and the press and anyone who'd fucking listen that it wouldn't be the same without you, that you were the one pushing him to be better, to swim faster, but you know that he's waiting to show them all in Brazil, show them that he doesn't need you. He's shown you that already.

You're still staring down at your phone, cursor blinking at the start of a blank message. You wonder what he'd say if you just told him, if you spelled out how fucking much you miss it, miss _him_. He'd probably call you a pussy and tell you to just get in the pool, swim until you stop thinking, but you know you can't, not anymore. You and the water and the lane line, you're as out of sync as you and Ryan.

You toss the phone aside again, throwing your head back and covering your face with your hands. It’s become somewhat of a common pose to find yourself in of late, despair latching hold tighter and tighter. You don’t want to be like this, you never wanted this to be how the rest of your life panned out. You’re barely thirty; there are so many more years to get through. You keep hanging on for something to change.

**

Your mom comes over in the morning and finds you on the couch again, curled up around Herman who’s drooled all over your sleeve in the night. She tells you to get up, take a shower, and leave the house for a few hours. You tell her you don’t want to, not today. It’s not been a good week. You haven’t left the house since the weekend, and that was only because Taylor had begged you to come and watch her ride her bike in the park. The sun on your skin had felt good, you can’t lie about that, but there were too many people, too many whispers, imagined or not, and after that you hadn’t wanted to leave the house anymore.

“It’s not good for you,” your mom says, fussing around you like she does, pushing your feet off the couch and dragging her fingers through the mess your hair has become. “You need to get some air, at least. That big back yard of yours and you sit inside in the dark...”

You stop listening properly, ignoring the words and letting the sound of your mom’s voice wash over you instead, wishing it would soothe you the way it used to when you were little, or not so little, when you were away at a meet and you called just to have something else to focus on for a few minutes; the little snatches of time you could allow yourself to give to someone other than the pool.

“Maybe later,” you tell her, blinking back to the present and looking up at her as she leans over you. There are more lines around her eyes than you remember and it makes you want to frown in sympathy. Did you put those there? “I’ll take the dogs to the water.”

“Good, see, that’s the spirit,” she says, clearly surprised and pleased at your apparent change of heart. You don’t want to make it a lie so you put it on today’s goal sheet – up until now it’d been blank. “How about the shower? You gonna manage that as well?”

“Jeez, Mom,” you groan, rubbing your face and pushing Herman off onto the floor. He grunts, unimpressed, and wanders off to find food. Your eyes scan the room for Stella and find her lying half under the coffee table, her head raised at the sound of Herman’s claws on the tile. You make a gesture towards her that she interprets as ‘breakfast is served’ and bounds after her slower companion. You get to your feet and turn your attention back to your mom who is still frowning at you. “I’m gonna feed these guys, then I’ll shower, promise. What?”

“You would tell me if there was something I could do, wouldn’t you?” she says, one hand on your arm, fingers squeezing tight. You wonder if she can feel your bones aching under your skin. “I’m still your momma.”

“Mom,” you start, but you don’t really know what to say. You can’t ask her to give you anything more than she already has, and you didn’t even ask for that in the first place. You can’t ask her to change time, to speed it up or slow it down, to give it back to you. And anyway, time is all you fucking have these days, and yet you still aren’t happy. “I know.”

She frowns harder for a second and then sighs, patting your arm where she was holding it before letting go. She pulls your arm around her shoulders and rubs your back like she used to when you first grew taller than her, leaning into you. You let her steer you into the kitchen, the dogs whining by their bowls as you get there, Stella nudging hers with a paw encouragingly. 

Your mom asks if you have any work coming up and you shake your head and tell her no, not in the near future. You had turned down NBC’s offer of going to trials with them, but you know they aren’t going to take no for an answer when it comes to Rio. The thought of it makes you sick to your stomach. You don’t want to go; you don’t want to be anywhere near any of it. You want to be on the Seychelles, or Tahiti, or fucking any place that isn’t Rio. You swallow back the nausea and pour the dogs’ food out before they drive you crazy.

“I might – I might have some clinics later in the spring,” you say as you put the bag of kibble away, shrugging one shoulder and thinking of the emails from your agent sitting unanswered in your inbox. You add ‘reply to an email’ to your goal list.

“Oh, that’s good!” Your mom’s enthusiasm hurts your ears a little and you fight back the urge to wince. “Where would they be?”

“Um,” you hesitate, trying to imagine what those unread emails might say. “Baltimore, New York, and, uh, I think somewhere in Texas? I’m not sure. I’ll probably just do the ones around here.”

Your mom beams at you, patting your arm as if you were ten not thirty. You swallow hard and force a smile back. “Good. That’s good, Mikey.” If she says ‘good’ one more time you might put your fist through a wall. Again.

“Can you promise me one more thing before you go out, Michael?”

You nod, wary, but you already have a goal list for today so you might as well add to it now. You suppose it can’t hurt. “Sure. What?”

“Shave when you take that shower, okay?”

You throw a dish towel at her retreating back and the laugh you let out feels natural, not forced, for the first time in a while.

**

You make it through the rest of February without too many bad days, everything getting easier as the weather gets less shitty, the cold sitting in your bones slipping slowly away. You still can’t face the thought of Rio but now you’re giving yourself other things to think about and concentrate on and it’s better. You tell yourself it was just the winter that made things so bad for so long. There are clinics to go to, kids to teach, and you make your mother smile more often than that sad face of ‘oh, Mikey, what am I going to do with you?’ that she spent months, a year, making at you when she thought you weren’t looking.

March has a literal and figurative spring in its step when you head to New York for a few days. Most of the time you’re caught up in stuff for Speedo and the foundation which you have always made sure is functioning at 100%, even if you aren’t, but you get an evening alone before you fly back home and you spend it wandering the streets with your hat down and your collar up. You watch people and let the city buzz and bustle around you, anonymous enough away from the hotel where even the guy who serves coffee for the breakfast rush knows that _the_ Michael Phelps is staying there. You find yourself wondering, not for the first time, if you should just rent a condo or something when you come here but then you think of how you’d be returning to yet another empty apartment and somehow the hotel doesn’t seem so bad anymore.

The last event you make an appearance at is a prize-giving for some kids with disabilities and it touches you and humbles you and makes you smile so genuinely that you can still be someone’s hero even though you feel so bad. You can still mean something to someone, to an eleven-year-old who keeps on trying and pushing and wanting to be the best because their mom showed them a video of you in Beijing and told them that you can do great things if you only put your mind to it, who has your picture on their wall and cries when you shake their hand and tell them they’re doing a fantastic job and that they should never be afraid to dream big.

Your throat aches and your eyes burn in the car back to the hotel later, and you find yourself inexplicably thinking of one of Ryan’s more ridiculous tweets from all those (three) years ago, where he told the world to _Always reach for the moon cuz if u slip up u will still be a star!!_ and the ache spreads from your throat to your chest. You squeeze your eyes shut and watch the lights flash through your eyelids, the feelings you’ve been pushing down and away for so long getting a chance to overtake you. It’s stupid and you hate it, that you are still so fucking gone on one person who probably doesn’t care anymore, hasn’t cared for a long time, hasn’t given you so much as a second thought since you fell apart.

It’s not even as though you can blame him; you didn’t exactly fight for it either. You were enjoying the freedom, the trips, the fucking _golf_ , and you can admit now that you resented (resent) the fact that he was still going on, that he wasn’t ready to throw it in for a different life, for _your_ life. You couldn’t ask him then and you sure as hell can’t ask him now.

You lean your head against the cool glass of the car window and let out a shaky breath, watching it cloud the world with fog momentarily before everything clears and you wish it was that easy to clear your head as well. You empty the minibar when you get into your hotel room and wake up with puffy, red-rimmed eyes you can’t meet in the mirror.

When you get back to Baltimore you’re restless in ways you haven’t been for a long while. You can’t stay still on the couch for more than five minutes at a time so you start running again and it feels good, and your mom makes happy noises at the muscle you start putting back on when you even make it to the pool a couple times a week and blow the dust off the weights in your back room. You still don’t talk to her about the stuff going on in your head; you don’t talk to anyone about it, apart from the dogs, and you feel dumb doing that so you don’t do it often. The dogs only ever hear about it when you have a few too many beers and too little sleep.

You drive down to D.C. and wander around under the cherry blossoms, snapping pictures and uploading them online, stupid hipster shots that make you laugh to yourself. Your phone blows up with replies and re-posts that you skim through while you sit and drink coffee later in the afternoon. You get a text message from Allison telling you that retirement has turned you into a pretentious fuck but she misses your stupid face and your stupid ears and wants to see you soon. You think you’d like that.

**

It’s May before you know it, and the summer is starting to tease you from a distance. You get regular updates from Allison now that she knows you are alive and Bob gets you along to the pool to help out teaching the little ones and you enjoy watching them splash ineffectually from one side of the kiddy pool to the other, their arms safely encased in floaties. You chat to their moms and dads, and it’s getting easier, all of it. Almost all of it.

You still dream about Ryan. You dream about waking up and finding that _this_ has been the nightmare. You dream about being back in London, watching the rain from your tiny cubicle of a room in the Olympic village, waiting for him to come bursting in. You dream about Beijing. You dream about Athens. You dream about all of it. You dream so much you try to avoid sleeping for a while but that leads to an almost car wreck when you close your eyes for too long behind the wheel on the way to the store one night and your mom freaks out and all but frogmarches you to the doctor for some sleeping pills. The pills stay in their bottle on the shelf in the bathroom cabinet, but you take the warning seriously.

Your hand hovers over your phone for a good five minutes after you see him on TV one day in June. It’s only a flash of him in a montage of athletes competing in Rio but it’s enough to set your heart racing, which takes you so much by surprise that you have to rewind the TV to check it was actually him and not your mind playing tricks. You watch it four times before your heartbeat returns to normal. It doesn’t fill you with panic and dread though, which is a definite step forward. Maybe by the time you actually arrive in Rio you’ll be able to get off the airplane without having a complete breakdown. 

Your birthday comes around sooner than you would like, although thankfully there’s no big party like your mom had thrown for your thirtieth last year. You go to your mom’s place for lunch and unwrap your few token gifts with your nieces and nephews sprawled over you, fall asleep under a pile of kids and get called old man for the rest of the day. Allison calls when you’re driving home and you talk to her until you get to your front door and find Ryan sitting on the step.

“Uh, Allie, I – I have to call you back,” you mumble into the phone, hanging up before you hear Allison’s response. You blink at the man in front of you, taking an involuntary step back when he levers himself to his feet.

“I was just, um, in the area, and, like, just thought I’d come by and say, uh, happy birthday. So, uh, happy birthday, MP,” Ryan says, one hand scratching the back of his neck. He has a strip of sunburn and freckles across his nose and goggle tan lines by his eyes when he comes closer. You take another step back.

“A text would’ve done it, Ryan,” you reply, your birthday lunch threatening to make a reappearance over Ryan’s shoes. “’Just in the area’? What the fuck?”

Ryan shrugs, dropping his hand from his neck to shove into the front pocket of his jeans as he looks down at the asphalt between you. “I had a thing in D.C., figured I’d swing by. We haven’t talked in fucking years, dude.”

“So you thought now was a good time to start?” You clench your fists at your sides, forcing yourself to keep it together while you’re still in full view of the neighbors. “On my freaking birthday?”

“Seemed as good as any, yeah,” Ryan says, chin jutting out defiantly when he lifts his head again. You can’t help but swallow hard when you meet his eyes, hard and soft at the same time like they always were. “I, like, miss you.”

“Don’t.” You don’t want to hear it, you don’t want to know. You really don’t want to have this discussion on the street. You push past him, fumbling for your keys in your pocket. You whistle for the dogs that have been running around the front yard since you got out of the car, unlocking the front door as quickly as your shaking hands will allow. 

“Can I come in?” Ryan’s voice is soft behind you, and you can feel the warmth of his body against your back, sending your mind running to places you’ve been trying so hard not to think about all year, places that you usually end up thinking about in bed, on the days when your dick gets with the program. You close your eyes and take a breath of the aftershave you can smell in the air around you.

“Yes,” your mind says.

“No,” your mouth says.

You close your eyes while you wait for Ryan to speak, caught in the doorway, one foot inside, one foot out, hand still on the frame. You hear him sigh before the warmth moves away, a quiet “okay,” coming a second later. “I’ll call you, jeah?”

“I dunno, Ryan,” you start, wishing you had said yes to him coming in, but it’s too late to change it now, and he’s already walking backwards down the yard when you turn around.

“I’ll see you in Rio, then. Allie told me you were gonna be there for NBC. That’s cool, bro.” Ryan smiles at you then, dimples flashing quickly. He swings his arms in front and behind him, fingers clicking as he does so, making him look like the teenaged Ryan you’d first met all those years ago.

“Yeah, I’ll be there,” you say, and it feels too easy, now. You could almost believe that no time had passed since the last time you were this close to one another.

“You can interview me when I go and break all your records,” Ryan says with a wink. “I’m gonna go out with a bang, baby.”

“You’re gonna retire?” you almost choke on the words, “For real?”

“Jeah. Ol’ Reezy’s gonna hang up his Speedo while he can still walk unaided,” Ryan says, putting on a voice like some old prospector from the Wild West and shuffling back towards you with an imaginary walking stick. “Then we can go play shuffleboard on some cruise ship and hustle the real old people for their pension money.”

You laugh and fuck it feels good.

“Anyways, I’ll see you around, MP.” Ryan salutes you, pulling a baseball cap out of somewhere and jamming it on his head before he turns around, waving over his shoulder at you. “Happy birthday!”

**

July is busy, stupidly so. You spend a fortnight in New York for meetings with NBC, paying through the nose for a hotel that could almost start to masquerade as home if only you were allowed to have the dogs with you. You miss them enough that your mom starts putting them on the phone, if only so you can hear their quiet whuffed breaths and whimpers when you say their names. Allie texts you excitedly as Rio gets closer and closer, and before you know it she’s off to acclimatize and you can’t believe that four years have passed since you were flying to France with Team USA to do the same before London.

Ryan texts you as well but you don’t reply. You don’t delete the messages either, though, saving the pictures he sends you of Carter and the pool and his nephews, which, fuck, they’re getting big and while you know this is logical because Taylor is like a proper little girl now, it still marks the passing of time far clearer than your aching heart.

Time. It always comes back to that. You still can’t deal with how much of it you have and yet how you need so much _more_. You throw yourself into your meetings, listening to what the station wants you to do, what kind of coverage they’re planning on putting together. You strike a deal that will get the foundation a ton of publicity and that makes you happiest of all. You think back to that eleven-year-old you met in spring and wonder if you can swing something to get her a trip out to the games; you’ll ask Hilary to look into it when you get back to Baltimore before you fly out yourself.

You don’t actively think about Rio until you’re packing your bags to go, folding your shirts as carefully as you can with shaking hands. There’s a Portuguese phrasebook on your bedside table that you’ve thumbed through once after your mom bought it as half a joke. You tell yourself you’ll read it on the plane – learning to say ‘thank you’ at the very least is on your goal sheet – and move it to where your iPod is charging. You’ve been there before, of course, back at the start of all this, when you still had a smile for the cameras and enthusiasm that didn’t have to come from someone else’s prodding (your mom’s, usually). You swam with some kids and went to tour the place where the aquatic center was being built; you told everyone you’d be back.

Your press pass stares back at you from the top of your carry on, _Michael Phelps – NBC_ emblazoned across it – the _former Olympian_ goes unsaid. You laughed when they asked if you would go and report on the golf as well, but you accepted anyway. You think it will be good to have somewhere to escape to away from the pool.

You take the sleeping pills out of your bathroom cabinet without looking at your reflection in the mirror and push the bottle into your shaving kit. It’s still unopened, but you feel better with the option there.

You take six deep breaths before you leave the bathroom.

**

You throw up in the airplane bathroom before you’ve even left US airspace, folded up impossibly in the tiny space so you don’t vomit on your shoes. You splash your face with water and avoid your eyes in the mirror, scrubbing your mouth with a paper towel before sitting down heavily on the closed lid of the toilet. You try to breathe normally but it’s not happening and your eyes burn as you fight back the tears that are pricking hard in the corners of your vision. Your stomach lurches again when you try to get up, knowing that the rest of your travelling party are going to start wondering (whispering) about what’s wrong. 

You press the heels of your hands into your eye sockets as hard as you dare and concentrate on the droning engine sounds and not the frantic hammering of your heart, the ragged wheeze of your chest as you suck in air as best you can. The frustration boils over into rage for a second and your hands clench into fists, nails scratching your forehead as they curl in on themselves. It hurts enough that it lets you take a deep breath at last, and the rage calms, the frustration settles back in your bones where it’s been living for so long now it feels normal.

The mirror survives as you exit the bathroom and head back to your seat. You think of the sleeping pills again and order a vodka-red bull instead when the steward comes to ask if he can get you anything.

**

You head to the beach as soon as you’re done checking in at your hotel, tired and rung out from the flight. You feel dirty and grimy but you have a couple of hours before you need to be anywhere so you’ll just shower when you get back to your room.

The beach is as crowded as you anticipated but it’s fine, here, there are far more people than will ever pay attention to you. You keep your shades on and your hat pulled low anyway out of habit, slumping down into a chair outside a bar and ordering a drink without ever really lifting your head. You wish you hadn’t travelled in your suit, but you’d known there’d be press at both airports and your mom had told you to look nice. You tug at your tie now, the heat making sweat start to run down your back, and you’re going to need to get the laundry service to rescue this shirt before you can wear it again.

You watch people on the beach for a while, listening to the strange language around you and the sound of the waves crashing. The bar has music on but it’s all in Portuguese too of course and not anything that you would listen to by choice so you shut it out. You text your mom to let her know you got here safe, even though you know she was probably tracking the flight the whole way.

Your thumb hovers over Ryan’s name in your contact list as you scroll down to get to Schmitty, your mouth going dry despite the beer you’re still drinking. You could just send him the same message you sent your mom, it wouldn’t mean anything. It wouldn’t. Only – only Ryan would then text back and then you’d be stuck, because you haven’t planned it any further than that and you don’t know if you can do this yet.

You text Allison instead, smiling at the exclamation points you get as a reply. You take a picture of your beer and the beach and send that to her, data charges be damned, and this time her reply makes you laugh out loud.

**bastard. Do u know how long its been since i had a beer?**

Your reply comes easily.

**they’re on me when you win that gold**

**

You feel sick as you ride to the aquatic center in the car that NBC sent to pick you up from the hotel, your palms sweaty against your thighs as you fight the urge to dig your nails into the bunched muscles you can feel there. It had hit you all of a sudden when you were getting dressed after your shower, where you’re about to go, who you’re about to see. You wish you could tell the driver to turn around and take you to the airport instead – there’s a moment when the nausea swells so much that you almost do – because you really, really don’t want to be here anymore. You don’t want to walk into that building and put on a happy face and sit and talk to people you used to race against, in full view of millions of people across the globe.

Most of all, you don’t want to see Ryan. No, scratch that, you _want_ to see him a hell of a lot. You want so badly that your stomach knots itself even tighter at the thought of it. You just wish you didn’t.

“Mr. Phelps?” The driver is looking at you expectantly in the rear-view when you lift your head and you blink when you realize the car has stopped. 

“Oh, uh, thanks. Sorry,” you mumble as you gather yourself together, wiping your hands down on the seat either side of you before you grab for the door handle, the Brazilian heat sweeping into the air conditioned box and making you sweat all over again as soon as you push it open. You pass over a handful of notes, not caring if it’s a stupid amount of money or not, and step out, pulling your glasses down over your eyes again.

You hold your head as high as you can manage it and walk in, flashing your pass as you go past security. They point you up a flight of stairs and you walk blindly along the corridor, the smell of chlorine making you feel simultaneously homesick and at home, until you find the booth you’re going to be watching from. Your co-commentators greet you with handshakes and slaps on the back that make you want to wince and shrink into the smallest space possible but you tell yourself you’re a grown man, that you can do this (besides, you promised your mom), and take your seat. You are even more proud of yourself when you don’t flinch away as the make-up girl powders your sweaty brow and nose, smiling gently at you as if she knows she’s petting a spooked horse. 

You look down at the notes they’ve given you: pronunciation guides for people’s names, facts and figures, order of races. Ryan’s name jumps out at you on every page, and you know for certain that you’re going to be asked to interview him at some point in the next week and you’re not going to be able to refuse.

**

You don’t feel anything close to envy as you watch the first group of swimmers line up on the blocks, until the starting buzzer sounds and your foot starts tapping out a rhythm for strokes that is just so ingrained in you by this point that even four years of retirement isn’t enough to have lost it completely. You hold your breaths in the turns as you alternate between watching out of the window and the tiny TV screen in front of you, and when the first place guy touches the wall you think your heart stops for a moment. 

And this is only the heats.

**

It’s stupid, you think, as you take a sip of water and try and calm yourself down before you are called upon to speak, to talk about so-and-so’s chances of a medal this time around, or the mess that the Spaniard in Lane 3 made of his start, because it’s not as though you’ve not watched or been to a meet since London, you went to quite a few every now and then, more for the foundation than anything, but still, you’ve been to meets. This is just – this is _Rio_ ; this is the _Olympics_. This is what _made_ you, this is what drove you on for most of your life, your family notwithstanding.

You think you do an okay job when the co-host turns to you and asks your opinion, you don’t stammer and you even manage to crack a smile when they play a clip of you from Sydney, awkward and teenaged. You duck your head, bashful, and brush off the compliments as you tend to these days. It’s harder to be confronted with your successes now when you still have days when you have to fight yourself to get dressed in the morning. Part of you wants to stand up and yell and say ‘if only you knew!’ and laugh at their stunned faces until you’re sick.

You don’t though, obviously, and when the next heat comes out to take their places behind the starting blocks you turn back to watch from the window, swallowing your heart back down when you spot a familiar (even now) silhouette emerging from the door to the ready room. Your world narrows down to Ryan as you watch him walk to his place, stretching his arms above his head and behind his back in turn, bopping his head to whatever Lil’ Wayne track he’s got in his ears. You can feel your mouth going dry as you watch Ryan get undressed, your palms sweating a little as inconveniently timed memories of watching him in more private settings flash through your mind. 

You clear your throat as unobtrusively as you can, reaching for your water with a hand you will swear blind is _not_ shaking, your parched throat gulping more than you mean to and making you cough harder. You think for a moment that someone has noticed but they’re all busy in their own worlds when you glance around the studio so you turn your attention back to Ryan.

You wonder if he knows you’re in the building, if someone has seen you and passed the information around. You know what terrible gossips any group of athletes can be, especially those who spend a lot of time on the road together. When you and Ryan – when you were – people had known almost instantly, despite the fact that neither of you outright mentioned it to anyone (Schmitty doesn’t count – you tell her things your own sisters don’t know). You wonder if you should just rip the band-aid off and actively seek him out, do it on your terms so you don’t have to deal with the panic of a surprise meeting like you had on your birthday.

Your thoughts get curtailed when the starter calls everyone to their marks, and you watch intently as Ryan readies himself, looking more focused than you’ve ever seen him – and that can only be a good thing. You _want_ good things for him, even now – especially now – and you know how much these Games will mean to him, you still remember how London felt for yourself, how every race got you closer to the end and took on a bit more meaning with every day that passed. You want Ryan’s last Olympics to be equally as special.

You push down the other thoughts of London before they have a chance to rear up fully, thoughts that lead you back to sweaty palms and dry mouths and images of Ryan on his knees in front of you, mouth pulled into that wide smile of his, his eyes crinkled at the corners so much they’d almost closed.

You jump a little when the buzzer sounds for the start and you look around you for a second, paranoid that everything you’ve been thinking is written as clearly on your face as it feels. It’s not, though, you know this, but you can’t help it anymore. It’s hard to make yourself focus on the other swimmers as well as Ryan, but you manage it, just about. That doesn’t stop you cheering quietly to yourself when he touches the wall easily in first place.

When he gets out of the pool and looks up to wave at the crowd, you go back to wondering if any of it is directed at you.

**

It gets easier, just like you knew it would, just like your mom said it would, and you get up every morning and you pull on your suit and you head to the pool and you watch other people swim until your skin starts to smell of chlorine a little again, just from being there, and you don’t think about how much you miss it, because it’s getting clearer now, how you can go on from here, how you can find your way.

You do miss Ryan, though, that much you can’t deny. You miss him more now that you see him all the time, and that kind of logic doesn’t make any sense to you at all. Out of sight almost out of mind was much easier to cope with. Now, you hear his laughter echoing across dining halls and through the corridors of the aquatic center, real or imagined you can’t always tell, and – and it makes you want to do things you haven’t let yourself do in a long time.

It makes you want to get back in the water.

It terrifies you, when you realize it. You wake up the night before Ryan’s first final in a cold sweat, from a dream where you could breathe underwater, like the mermaid you once posed as, and so you stayed under the surface for a very long time, and when you finally came back to land everything had changed but no one could tell you how or why it had happened.

You’ve kicked the sheets off at some point and the air conditioning is making you shiver as you lay there in only your underwear, staring up at the ceiling. There are indistinct noises coming from outside but the windows and curtains are both as thick as each other and do a good job of blocking the rest of the world out, so you can’t tell what time it is until you fumble for your phone on the bedside table, squinting at the sudden bright light of the screen as it wakes up.

It’s early, but you won’t be able to get back to sleep now, so you thumb it open and flick through a few of the pictures of the kids that your sisters have sent you, before you open your messages. You tell yourself you’re not looking for anything in particular but you’re lying. You find your conversation with Ryan and hold your breath as you open it up, scrolling back up through the messages and watching the clock turn back as you go.

 **good luck** , you send him, and follow it up with: **I’ll be rooting for ya!!!!** , then you drop your phone back onto the table and turn away from it, hoping that sleep will come before a reply.

**

In the end, it’s not you who interviews Ryan after his last race, and you’re so fucking glad, because listening to it through your earpiece in the studio is bad enough, and the catch in his voice when he speaks is giving you a lump in your own throat that’s about the size of Texas. It feels somehow too intimate, to have Ryan speaking right into your ear like this, to have no escape from the breathy little sigh he gives right after the interviewer asks him what he’s going to miss most – you have your fingers crossed that this is not going to be another ‘because racing’ moment, you want Ryan to bow out with _some_ dignity remaining – and hear him say “well, I don’t think I can miss anything that’s always going to be a part of me” with such sincerity that every organ in your body clenches in unison.

“But, uh, like, I guess I do already miss some things that have to do _with_ swimming, like, I have missed racing my boy MP these past years since the last, uh, Olympics. But, like, now I get to be retired with him so maybe we can find some other stuff to be rivals in.”

You close your eyes tight and wish hard.

**Author's Note:**

> Mix by cathedralhearts can by found here: http://www.mediafire.com/?ew55adrmei7ct9j


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